“HOW-TO” DEVELOP A WORD LAYOUT REPORT IN VISUAL STUDIO CODE

Nice question in Microsoft Dynamics BC Community about report development in Visual Studio Code: “How to modify an existing report in Business Central?” .Is there any way to development tools will be used by partners to modify standard Reports and build/modify custom Reports in Rdlc or in Word Layout?

Word Layout reports (my opinion) are a great choice for “Document Reports”, in my next new book “Implementing Dynamics NAV & Dynamics 365 Business Central” i will talk also about Reporting topics.

Now, in this case, i would to talk about “How to modify an existing Word Layout report in Business Central”.

Scenario example

I have an old World Layout report in Dynamics NAV 2018 that I want to convert to Visual Studio Code: in this case is the “Sales Invoice Report” named “SIR_WL” (Sales Invoice Report – Word Layout)

To create a new report based on an existing report (for example in Dynamics NAV 2018), you need to use Visual Studio Code (and Microsoft AL Language Extension) for creating the Dataset and the RDLC\Word layouts, then you can customize the layouts with standard tools like Report Builder (for RDLC Reports) or Microsoft Word (for Word Layout reports).

Develop in Local Sandbox

You can use a local development sandbox for develop new reports, from here, you can open C/SIDE and export the report as TXT object.

You can create that locally (by installing Docker and pulling microsoft/bcsandbox:latest) or use an Azure VM template (available here: aka.ms/bcdeveloperpreviewext)